What The Farmer Gets

I highlighted the most important line (to me) of your post.

I agree with you. If people stopped participating in messed up systems, those systems would die off, and a healthier system would take over.

Pony!

I believe this country might be improved if Texican had his wish and all existing commercial farmers grabbed profit power by keeping their production at home. The response would be an overwhelming and immediate demand to shut down the USDA and stop all giveaways from stolen taxpayer funds(these are the folks you would starve to death to force an increase of corporate farmer profits.) We must remember most of these individual industrial operators have a networth of more than a million dollars, mostly in land purchased and financed with back door tax payer rip offs through Congress. These poor farmers are well defined by the current crop of grain farmers that received record crop prices, yet still rushed to Washington, hand out for a hefty pile of that sweet taxpayer money.

If we could stop the biased and unreasonable giveways to a small group of greedy corporate pretenders, the immediate result would be an quick regrowth of small, real farmers that would again provide all the good, healthy foodstuffs this nation requires. Of course there would be a brief period of adjustment, but it is reassuring to know that small farmers are more efficent producers than the huge industrial operators. Poor Dow chemical would suffer a profit downturn with the return of yoeman farmers and drinking water would really begin to improve...Glen

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The more a man travels, acquires wisdom and learns about life, the more likely he is to marry a Country Girl.

If I was an educated person I'd use my own words, but there is something in this that speaks volumes to me. Hope if you read it you will see what I mean.
Poland by James A. Michener

Page 588-589
Bukowski was overeager to settle that question quickly: ‘Nations do not allow farmers to allow farmers to have unions. No nation does.’
‘Up to now,’ the bishop said. ‘Go on Buk.’
‘So far,’ Buk said accurately ’every gain that Solidarity has obtained for city
members has been ay our expense.’
‘ I wonder if that’s true.’
‘It seems so to us.’
‘Seem and is are two vastly different words’
‘Then let’s consider what’s actually happening. We farmers are being so savagely mistreated, paying more for all we need, getting less for all we grow, that we’re going on strike. Yes, that’s what I said. We are already on strike, producing less and allowing less of what we do produce to filter into regular channels of distribution. We’re on strike, and if we continue, the people of Poland will go hungry.’
‘ Are you proud of that?’ Bishop Barski asked.
‘I am mortally ashamed,’ Buk said.
‘Then why do you do it?’
‘Because it’s the only was we can make men like this one listen to our complaints.’
‘Tell me,’ Bukowski broke in. ‘Do you know of any major nation that allows its farmers to combine in unions? Does Russia?’
‘No Russia dose not,’ Bishop Barski said very quietly, ‘and I suppose that’s why that grate nation with all its power and all its marvelous agricultural land not feed itself. For two decades their farmers have been doing exactly what Buk says he’s doing.
They’ve been on strike, and not even machine guns can make them stop.’
‘How does this happen?’ Bukowski asked.
‘ Because the field is like a human soul, Mr. Minister. It must be nurtured in specific and careful ways. It must be tended with love. The man cultivating it must respect it and want to see every seed mature. He must fell that if he does not do well with his field-- his little field, the corner of the earth allowed him-- all the rest of the earth will starve. And you cannot dictate that attitude, because if you try, you see what the cultivator of the field will say; “To hell with this. Let the field rot.” It’s an indecent thing to say, and I am broken-hearted to hear a man like Janko Buk say it, but that’s what they say. And if I were a farmer, I think I would say it too. I would feed myself and say: “To hell with you big idea men in the city.”

That's a book worth reading periodically. It has a lot of wisdom in it.

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thank you for this quote, as I haven't read Michener's Poland before. And I'd forgotten what a wonderful writer Michener is.

--sgl

JFK: “Farmers are the only business people who have to buy everything at retail, sell everything at wholesale and pay the freight both ways.”

Add to that the fact that they support the greatest share of the cost of educating the children of the leaches via property taxes.

Not a very bright bunch.

<Woodchuck>

I'll have to pick that up when I next go to the library. A Michener would be a good end-of-Summer read.

Oh! That reminds me! I just finished a really good book about market gardening, farming, and life, and I wanted to start a thread about it...

Pony!

http://hoards.com/market_news/priceBOX.htm
This is updated monthly and shows last months mailbox prices paid to farmers for their milk.
at 8.5 pounds a gallon an average farmer would get 1.53 per gallon.
However whole milk from the farm is usually much richer than even whole milk at the store, which is about 3.25%. The plant is skimming the butterfat and making other stuff with it so that 1.53 is not all from the gallon of milk you buy at the store, it's also in the butter and other dairy products that are bought.

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Deja Moo; The feeling I've heard this bull before.

I think we're on the same page...

When I said die off, I meant consumers dying off. Every single person who doesn't have dirt under their fingernails at the end of the day, would soon either be under the dirt about six feet, or they'd be soaring around in the clouds....in a buzzards belly.

Commercial farming allows the vast majority of humanity to live. If commercial farming ceased to exist, the only people eating on a regular basis, would be... farmers. Teachers, bus drivers, accountants, etc........anyone coming home from 'work' in the evening, with clean shoes, would soon starve. Without commercial farming, Civilization (or, as we use to say, back in my more radical days... "Syphilisation") would cease to exist. Each of us has to ask ourselves, in Commercial farming ends, which side of the End of Civilization would we fall on?

If civilization falls before commercial farming, some of the folks most capable of surviving the fall, will be those folks with the skills to grow their own food. I've got some full time farming relatives... if everything ceases to function, there ability to use their monster tractors and plows will cease, and without them and the high powered fertilizers, they'll only be able to feed theirselves. Plowing with a mule, and fertilizing with manure, is great for subsistence farming, but it's not gonna support any extra humans.